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Introduction

Criminal informants provide important information to the justice system, but they also pose serious risks. We hope this website will help attorneys, journalists, advocates, and families to better understand this vital area of public policy.

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WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS

Criminal informants are famously unreliable. Jailhouse snitch testimony often leads to wrongful conviction. Over 45 percent of all innocent people exonerated from death sentences were wrongfully convicted based on the testimony of a lying criminal informant. This makes snitches the leading cause of wrongful conviction in U.S. capital cases.

YOUNG INFORMANTS

Police sometimes use children as young as 14 as informants. These children may be exposed to drugs, violence, and other criminal activities as they work to get information for their handlers. Some have been killed. California and New Jersey have laws restricting the practice: in other states police have discretion to use juvenile informants.

INFORMANT CRIMES

Some informants are serious criminals who receive leniency for their own crimes. The FBI has been known to use murderers as informants. Many jurisdictions permit drug dealers to continue selling drugs in exchange for cooperation. In 2011, the crimes committed by FBI informants alone totaled over 5,600.

URBAN COMMUNITIES PAY THE PRICE

Informants are a staple of drug enforcement. This means that where drug enforcement is heaviest, informant activity is also heaviest. Because drug arrests occur disproportionately in low-income African American neighborhoods, those residents must live with the crime, violence, and distrust that go with criminal informant use.

REFORM

Many states are rethinking their criminal informant policies. Some have passed laws restricting the use of jailhouse snitch witnesses. Some have created new rules for disclosure and accountability. The U.S. Congress is considering a number of reforms that would improve transparency and safety. In the future, the laws governing criminal informants will likely look very different than they do today.

In recent years a troubling trend has emerged within a number of poor, black communities. Termed "Stop Snitching," it has manifested itself in the form community members' refusing to cooperate with police investigations of community crimes. The result of this widespread refusal to cooperate has been a reduced number of crimes solved within these communities; without cooperating witnesses, it has proven exceedingly difficult for police to make criminal cases.

Reactions to Stop Snitching have taken two predominant forms, both of which are mistaken. The first, most often attributed to law enforcement officers, is contempt. To them, community members who do not assist in criminal investigations are violating the ethical obligation all citizens have to aid in the arrest and prosecution of criminal actors. The second reaction to Stop Snitching, most often coming from citizens largely isolated from poor, black communities, is confusion. Assuming the police to be allies of the citizenry, they wonder why anyone would even entertain the notion of refusing to help the police solve community crimes.

This Article suggests a different understanding of Stop Snitching, arguing that poor, black community members' refusal to cooperate with police investigations should be viewed as neither ethically condemnable nor inexplicable, but rather as a natural extension of the innate human aspiration to be loyal. It does so by situating Stop Snitching within the existing literature on loyalty and asserting that the refusal to cooperate with police represents a privileging of community loyalty over loyalty to the state. Throughout the various strata of contemporary society, such privileging of the familiar over the remote is common, and Stop Snitching is neither puzzling nor reprehensible when viewed as a manifestation of this manner of prioritization.

Once Stop Snitching is understood as a reflection of the weak loyalty bonds that exist between police officers and the poor, black communities they serve, it becomes clear that it can only be curtailed and ultimately eliminated through police efforts aimed at strengthening these bonds. This Article closes with a discussion of the steps police should take in order to succeed in this regard.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

FOX Undercover in Boston ran this story on the dangers of informant use: Informants cutting deals to continue lives of crime. Congressman Stephen Lynch was interviewed for the story. Lynch is the author of the Confidential Informant Accountability Act, see this post. When asked whether he was worried that informants get a "free pass," here is what he said:

It's worse than that. They get a free pass to continue their criminal enterprise. They get protection, basically amnesty. I just think there's a corrosive element to this confidential informant program.

By contrast, former U.S. Attorney Michael Sullivan focused on the benefits that informants can provide when investigating corrupt organizations:

Particularly as you're looking at things like organized crime, they played a critical role with regard to putting matters together in order to infiltrate the organization. It took a long time for the government to penetrate these organizations, and they did it initially by using informants, finding people who had some vulnerabilities and then exploiting those vulnerabilities and getting them to become government cooperators.